Mellanox Drivers Needs Contract?

[jwc]

I have a small Mellanox SAN for an ESXi lab. I've been running ESXi 5.1 on it, so I decided to experiment with 5.5 and 6.0 to get experience. When I went to the drivers at http://www.mellanox.com/page/products_dyn?product_family=36 it said:

NOTE: To obtain the driver for ESXi 5.X v1.8.2.4, please contact [email protected].

So, I contacted support, and got this reply:

According to our records, we could not locate any valid contract for you.

How does one get drivers without a support contract?

 

[Olga-SAN]

ask mellanox directly

we get tons of their stuff used for lab use and poc and never had any single issue with drivers / firmware upgrade

 

[jwc]

I never had an issue downloading from their website before until now myself. And, when I did ask them directly, they indicated that I needed a contract.

 

[BLKMGK]

Are you running it as Infiniband or as 10gig Ethernet? I too have been trying to figure out their drivers and whatnot having just purchased some of their MHQH29b cards. The drivers you're looking at look to be for Infiniband. I found these that I think will present the card as an Ethernet adapter?

Looking around I found references to two other firmwares that appear to be later than the archives on the page you linked -> MLNX-OFED-ESX-1.9.10.0-10EM-550.0.0.1331820.zip and MLNX-OFED-ESX-1.9.10.0-10EM-510.0.0.799733.zip. Those names might prove useful via Google!


Lastly - I'm finding some possible help for my card via this page

Sadly, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get this card running under ESX 6

 

[Shockey]

Wow, so they going to same way as HP. that sucks!

 

[dasaint]

@JWC PM Sent...

@BLKMGK - there are 2 types of drivers, the Ethernet which utilized the VPI side of the card and gives you 10/40GBe depending on the Switch/and configurations

WHat JWC is talking about is the OFED drivers... which require you to remove the ethernet side drivers in an esxi host. the native Inbox Drivers do get updated as ASYNCs... however there is an inbox driver for MLX Ethernet side the OFEDs however use to be free to download apparently not so much anymore... Hit me up if you have more questions..

I am running IPoIB in my HomeLab with ConnectX-2 and ConnectX-3 Cards in IPoIB on vSphere 6 i do plan on changing out to the ethernet VPI based side and see how that all rolls...